In June, Swift will make an appearance at Tribeca Film Festival for a special Subscribe

screening of All Too Well: The Short Film at New York City’s Beacon Theater and
then will sit down for a conversation about writing, directing and producing it. She’ll
also make her first film appearance since 2019’s Cats in David O. Russell’s star-
studded film Amsterdam. It’ll hit theaters in November.

Taylor Swift’s Full NYU Commencement Speech 

Hi, I’m Taylor.

Last time I was in a stadium this size, I was dancing in heels and wearing a glittery
leotard. This outfit is much more comfortable. 
 
I’d like to say a huge thank you to NYU‘s Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Bill
Berkeley and all the trustees and members of the board, NYU’s President Andrew
Hamilton, Provost Katherine Fleming, and the faculty and alumni here today who have
made this day possible. I feel so proud to share this day with my fellow honorees Susan
Hockfield and Felix Matos Rodriguez, who humble me with the ways they improve our
world with their work. As for me, I’m…90% sure the main reason I’m here is because I
have a song called ‘22’. And let me just say, I am elated to be here with you today as we
celebrate and graduate New York University’s Class of 2022.
 
Not a single one of us here today has done it alone. We are each a patchwork quilt of
those who have loved us, those who have believed in our futures, those who showed us
empathy and kindness or told us the truth even when it wasn’t easy to hear. Those who
told us we could do it when there was absolutely no proof of that. Someone read stories
to you and taught you to dream and offered up some moral code of right and wrong for
you to try and live by. Someone tried their best to explain every concept in this insanely
complex world to the child that was you, as you asked a bazillion questions like, ‘how
does the moon work’ and ‘why can we eat salad but not grass.’ And maybe they didn’t do
it perfectly. No one ever can. Maybe they aren’t with us anymore, and in that case I hope
you’ll remember them today. If they are here in this stadium, I hope you’ll find your
own way to express your gratitude for all the steps and missteps that have led us to this
common destination. 
 
I know that words are supposed to be my “thing,” but I will never be able to find the
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words to thank my mom and my dad, and my brother, Austin, for the sacrifices they
made every day so that I could go from singing in coffee houses to standing up here with
you all today because no words would ever be enough. To all the incredible parents,
family members, mentors, teachers, allies, friends and loved ones here today who have
supported these students in their pursuit of educational enrichment, let me say to you
now: Welcome to New York. It’s been waiting for you. 
 
I’d like to thank NYU for making me technically, on paper at least, a doctor. Not the type
of doctor you would want around in the case of an emergency, unless your specific
emergency was that you desperately needed to hear a song with a catchy hook and an
intensely cathartic bridge section. Or if your emergency was that you needed a person
who can name over 50 breeds of cats in one minute.
 
I never got to have the normal college experience, per se. I went to public high school
until tenth grade and finished my education doing homeschool work on the floors of
airport terminals. Then I went out on the road on a radio tour, which sounds incredibly
glamorous but in reality it consisted of a rental car, motels, and my mom and I
pretending to have loud mother-daughter fights with each other during boarding so no
one would want the empty seat between us on Southwest. 
 
“As a kid, I always thought I would go away to college, imagining the posters I’d hang
on the wall of my freshmen dorm.”
As a kid, I always thought I would go away to college, imagining the posters I’d hang on
the wall of my freshmen dorm. I even set the ending of my music video for my song
“Love Story” at my fantasy imaginary college, where I meet a male model reading a book
on the grass and with one single glance, we realize we had been in love in our past lives.
Which is exactly what you guys all experienced at some point in the last four years,
right?
 
But I really can’t complain about not having a normal college experience to you because
you went to NYU during a global pandemic, being essentially locked into your dorms or
having to do classes over Zoom. Everyone in college during normal times stresses about
test scores, but on top of that you also had to pass like 1,000 COVID tests. I imagine the
idea of a normal college experience was all you wanted too. But in this case, you and I
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both learned that you don’t always get all the things in the bag that you selected from
the menu in the delivery service that is life. You get what you get. And as I would like to
say to you, you should be very proud of what you’ve done with it. Today, you leave New
York University and then you go out into the world searching for what’s next.  And so
will I.
 
So as a rule, I try not to give anyone unsolicited advice unless they ask for it. I’ll go into
this more later. I guess I have been officially solicited in this situation, to impart
whatever wisdom I might have and tell you the things that helped me in my life so far.
Please bear in mind that I, in no way, feel qualified to tell you what to do. You’ve worked
and struggled and sacrificed and studied and dreamed your way here today and so, you
know what you’re doing. You’ll do things differently than I did them and for different
reasons. 
 
So I won’t tell you what to do because no one likes that. I will, however, give you some
life hacks I wish I knew when I was starting out my dreams of a career, and navigating
life, love, pressure, choices, shame, hope and friendship.
 
The first of which is…life can be heavy, especially if you try to carry it all at once. Part of
growing up and moving into new chapters of your life is about catch and release. What I
mean by that is, knowing what things to keep, and what things to release. You can’t
carry all things, all grudges, all updates on your ex, all enviable promotions your school
bully got at the hedge fund his uncle started. Decide what is yours to hold and let the
rest go. Oftentimes the good things in your life are lighter anyway, so there’s more room
for them. One toxic relationship can outweigh so many wonderful, simple joys. You get
to pick what your life has time and room for. Be discerning. 

“You can’t carry all things, all grudges, all updates on your ex, all
enviable promotions your school bully got at the hedge fund his uncle
started. Decide what is yours to hold and let the rest go.”

Secondly, learn to live alongside cringe. No matter how hard you try to avoid being
cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is unavoidable
over a lifetime. Even the term “cringe” might someday be deemed “cringe.”
 
I promise you, you’re probably doing or wearing something right now that you will look
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back on later and find revolting and hilarious. You can’t avoid it, so don’t try to. For
example, I had a phase where, for the entirety of 2012, I dressed like a 1950s housewife.
But you know what? I was having fun. Trends and phases are fun. Looking back and
laughing is fun. 
 
And while we’re talking about things that make us squirm but really shouldn’t, I’d like to
say that I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things. It seems to me
that there is a false stigma around eagerness in our culture of “unbothered
ambivalence.” This outlook perpetuates the idea that it’s not cool to “want it.” That
people who don’t try hard are fundamentally more chic than people who do. And I
wouldn’t know because I have been a lot of things but I’ve never been an expert on
“chic.” But I’m the one who’s up here so you have to listen to me when I say this: Never
be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were
the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school. The people who want it
most are the people I now hire to work for my company. 

“The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and
be friends with in high school. The people who want it most are the
people I now hire to work for my company.”

I started writing songs when I was 12 and since then, it’s been the compass guiding my
life, and in turn, my life guided my writing. Everything I do is just an extension of my
writing, whether it’s directing videos or a short film, creating the visuals for a tour, or
standing on stage performing. Everything is connected by my love of the craft, the thrill
of working through ideas and narrowing them down and polishing it all up in the end.
Editing. Waking up in the middle of the night and throwing out the old idea because you
just thought of a newer, better one. A plot device that ties the whole thing together.
There’s a reason they call it a hook. Sometimes a string of words just ensnares me and I
can’t focus on anything until it’s been recorded or written down. 
 
As a songwriter, I’ve never been able to sit still, or stay in one creative place for too long.
I’ve made and released 11 albums and in the process, I’ve switched genres from country
to pop to alternative to folk. This might sound like a very songwriter-centric line of
discussion but in a way, I really do think we are all writers. And most of us write in a
different voice for different situations. You write differently in your Instagram stories
than you do your senior thesis. You send a different type of email to your boss than you
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do your best friend from home.
 
We are all literary chameleons and I think it’s fascinating. It’s just a continuation of the
idea that we are so many things, all the time. And I know it can be really overwhelming
figuring out who to be, and when. Who you are now and how to act in order to get where
you want to go. I have some good news: it’s totally up to you. I also have some terrifying
news: it’s totally up to you.
 
I said to you earlier that I don’t ever offer advice unless someone asks me for it, and now
I’ll tell you why: As a person who started my very public career at the age of 15, it came
with a price. And that price was years of unsolicited advice. Being the youngest person
in every room for over a decade meant that I was constantly being issued warnings from
older members of the music industry, the media, interviewers, executives. This advice
often presented itself as thinly veiled warnings. See, I was a teenager in the public eye at
a time when our society was absolutely obsessed with the idea of having perfect young
female role models. It felt like every interview I did included slight barbs by the
interviewer about me one day “running off the rails.”

“My experience has been that my mistakes led to the best things in my
life. And being embarrassed when you mess up is part of the human
experience.”

That meant a different thing to everyone person said it me. So I became a young adult
while being fed the message that if I didn’t make any mistakes, all the children of
America would grow up to be perfect angels. However, if I did slip up, the entire earth
would fall off its axis and it would be entirely my fault and I would go to pop star jail
forever and ever. It was all centered around the idea that mistakes equal failure and
ultimately, the loss of any chance at a happy or rewarding life. 
 
This has not been my experience. My experience has been that my mistakes led to the
best things in my life. 
 
And being embarrassed when you mess up is part of the human experience. Getting
back up, dusting yourself off and seeing who still wants to hang out with you afterward
and laugh about it? That’s a gift.
 
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The times I was told no or wasn’t included, wasn’t chosen, didn’t win, didn’t make the
cut…looking back, it really feels like those moments were as important, if not more
crucial, than the moments I was told “yes.”
 
Not being invited to the parties and sleepovers in my hometown made me feel
hopelessly lonely, but because I felt alone, I would sit in my room and write the songs
that would get me a ticket somewhere else. Having label executives in Nashville tell me
that only 35-year-old housewives listen to country music and there was no place for a
13-year-old
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But then I’d post my songs on my MySpace — yes, MySpace — and would message with
other teenagers like me who loved country music, but just didn’t have anyone singing
from their perspective. Having journalists write in-depth, oftentimes critical, pieces
about who they perceive me to be made me feel like I was living in some weird
simulation, but it also made me look inward to learn about who I actually am. Having
the world treat my love life like a spectator sport in which I lose every single game was
not a great way to date in my teens and twenties, but it taught me to protect my private
life fiercely. Being publicly humiliated over and over again at a young age was
excruciatingly painful but it forced me to devalue the ridiculous notion of minute by
minute, ever fluctuating social relevance and likability. Getting canceled on the internet
and nearly losing my career gave me an excellent knowledge of all the types of wine. 
 
I know I sound like a consummate optimist, but I’m really not. I lose perspective all the
time. Sometimes everything just feels completely pointless. I know the pressure of living
your life through the lens of perfectionism. And I know that I’m talking to a group of
perfectionists because you are here today graduating from NYU. And so this may be
hard for you to hear: In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the wrong people,
under-react, overreact, hurt the people who didn’t deserve it, overthink, not think at all,
self sabotage, create a reality where only your experience exists, ruin perfectly good
moments for yourself and others, deny any wrongdoing, not take the steps to make it
right, feel very guilty, let the guilt eat at you, hit rock bottom, finally address the pain
you caused, try to do better next time, rinse, repeat.  And I’m not gonna lie, these
mistakes will cause you to lose things.
 
I’m trying to tell you that losing things doesn’t just mean losing. A lot of the time, when
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we lose things, we gain things too. 
 
Now you leave the structure and framework of school and chart your own path. Every
choice you make leads to the next choice which leads to the next, and I know it’s hard to
know sometimes which path to take. There will be times in life when you need to stand
up for yourself. Times when the right thing is to back down and apologize. Times when
the right thing is to fight, times when the right thing is to turn and run. Times to hold on
with all you have and times to let go with grace. Sometimes the right thing to do is to
throw out the old schools of thought in the name of progress and reform. Sometimes the
right thing to do is to listen to the wisdom of those who have come before us. How will
you know what the right choice is in these crucial moments? You won’t.
How do I give advice to this many people about their life choices? I won’t. 
Scary news is: you’re on your own now.
Cool news is: You’re on your own now.
 
I leave you with this: We are led by our gut instincts, our intuition, our desires and
fears, our scars and our dreams. And you will screw it up sometimes. So will I. And
when I do, you will most likely read about on the internet. Anyway…hard things will
happen to us. We will recover. We will learn from it. We will grow more resilient
because of it. 
 
As long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe through,
breathe deep, breathe out. And I’m a doctor now, so I know how breathing works. 
 
I hope you know how proud I am to share this day with you. We’re doing this together.
So let’s just keep dancing like we’re…
 
…The class of 22.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T